Otto-Messmerism

In Jungle Bungles, Felix the Cat, first animated movie star, takes a newsreel camera to Africa to make a documentary, and ends up massacring most of the wildlife. In one memorable scene, he sucks an angry monkey into his camera, grinding him out the other end as a string of sausages, which are then fed to another hostile animal. Some kind of metaphor for the power of cinema?

Monkey sausages.

Also, most of the animals are thinly-veiled stereotyped black people.

I have a sort of perverse interest in Mickey Mouse, precisely because he’s so uninteresting. He’s just a squeaky-voiced version of the all-American hero, struggling mousefully with whatever difficulties beset him. Nothing he does is specific to any particular characteristic. At least Donald has his temper tantrums. In other words, from the very start, Mickey was more corporate logo than character.

But Felix now supplants Mickey in my affections, because he’s even more of a featureless cipher. He does have a tendency to pace when thinking, and an ability to solve all narrative problems by either removing his tail and using it as a utensil, or creating large bits of punctuation with the power of his mind (typically question marks and exclamation marks: semi-colons and apostrophes not so much) and again using them as instruments to further his feline ends. But these attributes do not really produce character depth. Shakespeare created numerous rounded personalities, none of whom, so far as the stage directions make clear, ever grabbed hold of a hyphen to solve their problems, despite the wealth of weird punctuation littering the folios.

Worse, Felix is inconsistent as to his occupation, family set-up, and personality. Sometimes he’s single and amorous, sometimes he’s a family cat with several dependents, sometimes he’s a hustling businessman, sometimes more like a little kid. Creator Otto Messmer cited Chaplin as his big influence, and Charlie seemed to flit through social strata like a ghost, appearing as a married bricklayer in one short, unemployed and single in another, but his tramp persona grew more solid as Felix just fragmented more and more.

Admittedly, the cat still had more individuality than Bosko or Bimbo or even Koko, but at least those flimsy Fleischer stereotypes were consistent. Consistently bland, perhaps, but the cartoons they took part in were so nightmarishly strange and wondrous that spiky characters of the later Warners school were unnecessary. Felix’s world isn’t particularly surreal by comparison, though watching him battle the white-bearded controller of the weather is an eye-opener. The sheer hunger for ideas seems to have compelled Messmer into some weird scenarios.

Monkey sausages.

by David Cairns